“As the government stands,” Patrick Henry thundered, “I
despise and abhor it… I speak as one poor individual—but
when I speak, I speak the language of thousands. If I am asked what is
to be done when a people feel themselves intolerably oppressed, my answer
is… ‘overturn the government!”

Henry’s roar of exhortation was not aimed at Britain; it was aimed
at the United States, as the thirteen former British colonies considered
whether to adopt a new constitution. As he had done a decade earlier in
his famed cry for “liberty or death,” Henry once again roared
for the rights of free men to govern themselves with as few restrictions
from government as possible. His roar would reverberate through the ages
of American history to this very day.

Known to generations of Americans for his stirring call to arms, “Given
me liberty or give me death,” Patrick Henry is all but forgotten
as the first of the Founding Fathers to call for independence, for revolution
against the government—America as well as British. If Washington
was the “Sword of the Revolution” and Jefferson “the
Pen,” Patrick Henry more than earned his epithet as “the Trumpet” of
the Revolution for rousing Americans to arms in the Revolutionary War!

As the first governor of Virginia—then the most important colony
in America—Henry became the most important civilian leader of the
Revolutionary War, ensuring troops and supplies for Washington’s
Continental Army and engineering the American victory over British and
Indian forces in the West that brought present-day Illinois, Indiana,
Ohio, and Kentucky into the Union. Without Patrick Henry, there might
never haven been a revolution, independence, or United States of America.

A champion of religious freedom, Henry fought to end slave importation
and was the true father of the Bill of Rights. Recognized in his day as
America’s greatest orator and lawyer, Henry bitterly opposed big
national governments—American as well as British. He sought, instead,
to unite American states in an “amicable” confederation that
left each state free to govern itself as it saw fit, but ready to unite
with its neighbors in defense against a common enemy. A bitter foe of
the Constitution, he predicted that its failure to limit federal government
powers would restore the very tyranny that had provoked the revolution
against Britain. He warned that tyranny that had provoked the revolution
against Britain. He warned that the Constitution as written failed to
include a bill of rights to guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of religion,
freedom of the press, trial by jury, redress of grievances, and other
basic individual rights.

Although the First Congress passed some of Henry’s amendments to
protect individual liberties, it rejected his demands to impose strict
limits on federal powers and safeguard state sovereignty. His struggle
for the rights of states to govern themselves sowed the seeds of secession
in the South and subsequent growth of the large intrusive federal government
that Henry so despised. Within months of taking office, Congress enacted
a national tax without the consent of state legislatures—as Parliament
had with the Stamp Act in 1765. In 1794, President Washington fulfilled
Henry’s prophecy of presidential tyranny by sending troops into
Pennsylvania to suppress protests against federal taxation—as Britain’s
Lord North had done in Boston in 1774.

To this day, many Americans misunderstand what Patrick Henry’s
cry for “liberty or death” meant to him and to his tens of
thousands of devoted followers in Virginia’s Piedmont hills—then
and now. A prototype of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American
frontiersman, Henry claimed that free men had a “natural right” to
live free of “the tyranny of rulers”—American, as well
as British. A student of the French political philosopher Montesquieu.
Henry believed that individual rights were more secure in small republics,
where governors live among the governed, than in large republics where “the
public good is sacrificed to a thousand views.” Rather than the
big government created by the Constitution, Henry sought to create an
alliance of independent, sovereign states in America—similar to
Switzerland, whose confederation, he said, had “stood upwards of
four hundred years…braved all the power of …ambitious monarchs… [and]
retained their independence, republican simplicity, and valor.”

The son of a superbly educated Scotsman from Aberdeen, Henry grew up
in Virginia’s frontier hill country—free to hunt, fish, swim,
and roam the fields and forests at will. Far from government constraints
and urban crowding, everyday life in the Piedmont was an adventure with
wild animals, Indian marauders, and fierce frontiersmen. Unable at times—or
unwilling—to distinguish between license and liberty, they viewed
government with suspicion and hostility—and tax collectors as fit
for nothing better than a bath in hot tar and a coat of chicken feathers.
The results were often conflict, gunfire, bloodshed, death and quasi-civil
war. For backcountry farmers and frontiersmen, the business end of a musket
was the best way to preserve individual liberty from government intrusion.
And Patrick Henry was one of them—their man, their hero. George
Washington viewed frontier life as anarchy; Henry called it liberty!

Neither saint nor villain, Henry was one of the towering figures of the
nation’s formative years and perhaps the greatest orator in American
history. Lord Byron, who could only read what Henry had said, called him “the
forest-born Demosthenes,” and John Adams, who did hear him, hailed
him as America’s “Demosthenes of the age.” George Washington “respected
and esteemed” him enough to ask him to serve as secretary of state,
then Chief Justice of the United States. Virginia Patriot George Mason
called Henry “the first man upon this continent in abilities as
well as public virtues” and the Founding Father most responsible
for “the preservation of our rights and liberties.”

Unlike Washington and Jefferson, who tied their fortunes to Virginia’s
landed aristocracy, Henry achieved greatness and wealth on his own, among
ordinary, hard-working farmers in Virginia’s wild Piedmont hills
west of Richmond, where independence, self-reliance, and a quick, sharp
tongue were as essential to survival as a musket.

A charming storyteller who regaled family and friends with bawdy songs
and lively reels on his fiddle, Henry was as quick with a rifle as he
was with his tongue—and he fathered so many children (eighteen)
and grandchildren (seventy-seven at last count) that friends instead he,
not Washington, was the real father of country. His direct descendants
may well number more than 100,000 today—enough to populate the entire
city of Gary, Indiana.

Remembered only for his cry for “liberty or death,” Henry
was one of the most important and most colorful of our Founding Fathers—a
driving force behind three of the most important events in American history:
the War of Independence, the enactment of the Bill of Rights, and tragically,
the Civil War.